PANEL “Five visions of a PDF future” at the PDF Days Europe 2018

At the end of the main conference for the PDF Days Europe 2018, the PDF Association will be hosting a panel discussion with leading minds from the PDF industry. Moderated by our Chairman, Matt Kuznicki, Catherine Andersz (PDFTron), Richard Cohn (Adobe), Harald Grumser (Compart), Carsten Heiermann (Foxit) and Duff Johnson (PDF Association) will present their ideas for the next 25 years of PDF. Following five short (3-minute!) presentations, this session will become a panel discussion on big-picture questions.

• Will PDF ever be eclipsed, and how?
• What’s blockchain’s role, if any, in PDF’s future?
• Is rendering fundamental to the conception of an electronic document, or is it just a hang-over from paper?

Audience members will also get a chance to discuss their own strategic questions.

Catherine Andersz, Co-Founder and CEO of PDFTron Systems Inc., is responsible for driving PDFTron's strategy and is passionate building happy teams that consistently deliver the best customer experience. For past 17 years Catherine has worked at an intersection of highly technical and business requirements related to PDF and document processing, and has attained a unique perspective and industry expertise. Working alongside with developers, users, and business partners she has a track record ensuring that technology (and PDF format itself) is evolving in the right direction.
Richard Cohn is a Principal Scientist at Adobe, where he’s worked for 25 of the past 30 years, half those years in Boston and half in Silicon Valley. As architect and technical lead for Acrobat 1.0, he designed the first version of PDF as well as implemented core pieces of Acrobat itself. He also led the team that created the first viewer for SVG, the Scalable Vector Graphics format for the web. Most recently, he’s worked on applying machine learning to the 25-year-old problem of extracting document structure from PDFs.
Harald Grumser has been the head of Compart AG since 1992, when he founded the company along with its other shareholders. After a few years studying physics at the University of Karlsruhe, he switched fields to data processing in 1984. He spent the first few years working both in software development and in editorial roles (at Hüthig-Verlag and Heidelberg), where he published a wide range of specialist articles for the burgeoning PC and microprocessor sector. After several years leading a European PC project for IBM, he took over as Director of PC Applications for a software company based in Böblingen, Germany, after which he then founded Compart.
Carsten Heiermann is CEO of Foxit Europe’s organization. Since 1995, Carsten has been founder and CEO of the LuraTech group, that has been acquired by Foxit in 2015. After studying communications engineering and undertaking work in various IT companies, since 1995, Carsten Heiermann has concerned himself with topics connected with compression, standardization and electronic document capture and conversion. At Foxit today, Carsten is responsible for all of Foxit’s business in Europe and leads the Berlin, Germany based product and development group for Foxit’s server side PDF products in the enterprise automation business unit.
Duff Johnson has worked in the PDF space since 1996, the year he founded Document Solutions, Inc. (DSI), the first business document service bureau dedicated to PDF technology. Today, Johnson serves as ISO Project Leader for PDF (ISO 32000) and PDF/UA (ISO 14289, and as Executive Director of the PDF Association.

Check out the detailed programme:
https://pdfa.org/pdf-days-europe-2018-schedule-of-sessions/

Direct link for registration:
https://en.xing-events.com/pdf-days-europe-2018.html